Romerica Cracks

Madame,

Historian Maier might have also pointed out that Rome too followed the same pattern.  After a time, the once immensely productive Italian peninsula produced relatively little and became a consumer, a net importer, with large and continuous trade deficits.  But the Romans didn’t think they need be that concerned, even when the economic strength was shifting to the East.  After all, the Romans reasoned, they (the Romans) were good businessmen, with international operations, and besides they were Rome, the sole superpower! 

The historical absurdity being repeated would be comical—if it weren’t so tragic.

Your observations are canny.  I would add there’s an intrinsic feeling of being less vulnerable when you make something yourself.

While we divert ourselves, albeit pleasantly, in “March Madness” (which is just a magnified form of the madness we have nearly year round), we become unwitting serfs, with fewer and fewer attaining livable wages (itself a subject of great depth not going into here).  The results of our increasingly decrepit society are all around us, if we face the reality: “Our infrastructure—roads, bridges, sewers, airports, trains, mass transit—is overburdened, outdated, and in dismal repair.” (Prof’s Note: And often the wrong kind, wrong design, and wrong assumptions!)  China is constantly opening a new mass transit system; Europeans (nasty socialistic pukes!) often have no need of cars because of theirs.  What do we do have?  A rail system that is so “antiquated and inefficient (it) cannot maintain its lumbering cars and aging tracks.”  And broken pipes, potholes, overwhelmed sewage systems (See Lester Brown’s book from my blog), schools physically falling apart, a for-profit health care system that forces Americans to spend more and get less than their industrialized contemporaries, and that causes half of all American bankruptcies from unable-to-be-paid medical bills.  (144)

We (again—except for Israel—why aren’t others?) are itching for war with Iran, instead of learning from history and seeking to truly understand its culture, its goals, and the true nature of the “threat,” let alone its internal possibilities for change (this road seem familiar?).  We ramp up militarism at the drop of a hat; we spend more than all the other militaries of the earth combined.  Home foreclosures, job losses, bank and financial firm failures and bailouts, poverty, infrastructure decay, the hundreds of Bifftowns and Pottersvilles emerging—all just examples directly (although not fully, to be sure) related to the hollowing out we do to ourselves by our costly and often futile interventions abroad with such an incredibly expensive military force.   Only our embrace of illusion, our ready willingness to be diverted by constantly changing vaporous “issues” of the moment, keeps our “leaders” from being “exposed as a group of mortals waving a sword at a tidal wave.” (145)

Hedges says that “at no period in America history has our democracy been in such peril or the possibility of totalitarianism as real.  Our way of life is over…Our children will never have the standard of living we had. This is the bleak future. This is reality.  There is little President Obama can do to stop it.  It has been decades in the making.  It cannot be undone with…(trillions) in bailout money.  Nor will it be solved by clinging to the illusions of the past.”

I just finished reading “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.”  It has many things we could discuss sometime, but a few things are relevant to this point of the discussion.  The author, a Chinese-American, remarks that American children are “pampered and decadent like the Romans when their empire fell.”  Even a review of the book made the connections:

“The analogy of child rearing to our national situation is clear enough: just as American parents are too concerned with ‘self esteem’ without basing self-esteem on an actual accomplishment…so our entire culture operates on some notion of natural rights that is no longer realistic.  Chua’s point is that a delusional culture based on unearned self-esteem can’t for long be a realistic player in global competition for influence, power, and resources.  Is it possible that we should mind our Tiger Mother?” The New York Review of Books

When Hedges asks whether we will “radically transform our system to one that protects the ordinary citizen and fosters the common good, that defies the corporate state, or will we employ the brutality and technology of our internal security and surveillance apparatus to crush all dissent?” (145), he’s asking a defining one.

Jury’s still out on that one, but we have so much promise, so many tools and transformations that have been made that are POSITIVE, it only makes our effortless failure all the more tragically agonizing! 

Hmmm. Seems I took just a bit over my breath of wind. :)